08 Sep Following The Evidence #50
The archaeological evidence for the Bible is something worth noting. Nothing archaeology has found contradicts the Bible; in fact the opposite is always the case. The discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 is one of the great milestones in Biblical Archaeology.
On July 19, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovered a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 56kms east of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honouring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artefact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.
Napoleon was an emperor known for his enlightened view of education, art and culture. When he invaded Egypt in 1798, he took along a group of scholars and told them to seize all important cultural artefacts for France. Pierre Bouchard, one of Napoleon’s soldiers, was aware of this order when he found the basalt stone at a fort near Rosetta. It was over 1 meter long and .8 of a meter wide. When the British defeated Napoleon in 1801, they took possession of the Rosetta Stone.
Several scholars, including Englishman Thomas Young made progress with the initial hieroglyphic’s analysis of the Rosetta Stone. French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), who had taught himself ancient languages, ultimately cracked the code and deciphered the hieroglyphics in 1822, using his knowledge of Greek as a guide. Hieroglyphics used pictures to represent objects, sounds and groups of sounds. Once the Rosetta Stone inscriptions were translated, the language and culture of ancient Egypt was suddenly open to scientists as never before. This became hugely significant when it came to verifying stories in the Bible that sceptics had said were not facts of history. Tomorrow we will see some examples.
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